Spec. Corey Quintanilla and his wife, Tatiana, relax on the couch and watch TV in Colorado Springs as their daughter, Leah, 9 months, rests nearby. After a year-long tour of duty in Iraq, Quintanilla is happiest staying at home watchinglight-hearted programs and movies, but concerns about his daughters health and his future employment intrude.

STAYING HOME | "I went out every day in Iraq, whether I wanted to or not. Thisis my time to chill." - Corey Quintanilla

Before he went out the gate in Iraq, Spec. Corey Quintanilla rubbed the guardian-of-the-skies pendant, kissed his wedding ring and pressed the good-luck charm taped to his gun shield.

Even for a guy who would run around base camp with the sides of his underwear pulled up to look like a G-string, leaving base camp meant serious business. No one ever knew where the next roadside bomb or rocket-propelled grenade would come from.

Quintanilla took the gunner position in the Humvee the morning of Jan. 2, 2005, and began the 12-hour shift patrolling a supply route near Ramadi when the improvised explosive device, or IED, exploded.

The head-splitting crack left him temporarily deaf. He thought his heart would rattle out of his chest. He whirled and pointed the gun at a spot where he thought the triggerman might be hiding. He couldn’t see him.

Other than frying his nerves, the IED caused little damage, grazing only the front of the Humvee.

When the shift ended and he walked back into camp, Quintanilla finished the second half of his daily ritual, a silent prayer thanking God for his surviving another shift.

He went to a tent filled with computers and phones, signed on to his laptop and found a message informing him that his wife, who was expecting the couple’s first child in February, was in labor.

“How can this be?” Quintanilla wondered. “What’s going on?”

The lines for the phone were long, a two- or three-hour wait, so he got into a truck and drove to the AT&T phones about a mile away. He called his parents, who confirmed the news.

Quintanilla drove back to the base and went to his bunk. He wanted to be calm, but his mind raced. He drank a whole bottle of NyQuil to try to sleep, but it didn’t work.

All night long he agonized about getting home. His two- week leave wasn’t scheduled until Feb. 1.

He beat himself up emotionally. Why had he volunteered for this duty in Iraq? How could he leave his wife when she was pregnant? How could he let her go through this alone?

Quintanilla got out of bed when it was time for the shift to begin. He rubbed the pendant, kissed his wedding ring and went out the gate.

He told the other guys on the Humvee that Tatiana was in labor at Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville, Ga., near her hometown.

The shift was uneventful.

Afterward, Quintanilla rushed back to the tent with the phones, plugged in his laptop. No baby.

He lay in his bunk. He had not slept in more than 36 hours, but he could not rest. He stared at the pictures of Tatiana taped to the bunk above his and tried to imagine what was happening so many miles away from the war.

“God, I’ve got to get there, some way or another.”

He clutched the beads of his rosary and prayed: “Hail Mary, full of grace.”

In the morning, an e-mail said Leah Quintanilla had been born but that there were problems. She had been rushed to a children’s hospital in Atlanta.

Quintanilla begged his superiors to let him go home, but there were no slots for him.

Then, out of the blue, a soldier – a familiar face, but not a close friend – came to Quintanilla as he sulked in his bunk and offered to give up his leave.

Quintanilla called Tatiana.

“Hey, babe,” he said.

Tatiana was bawling.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

At birth, Leah didn’t cry. Her arms were stiff and her hands fisted, with palms out and knuckles inward.

A neurologist said it was likely that she had had a stroke while in the womb.

“I’m coming home,” he said.

Happiness, sadness mixed

The flight from Kuwait to Georgia took a full day, but Corey Quintanilla finally made it.

Still wearing his desert camouflage uniform, he hurried into the neonatal intensive-care unit. He stopped in front of the plastic crib with a paper that said: “It’s a girl. Leah Quintanilla. 7 pds.”

She looked so peaceful, asleep in the white robe, her dark hair spilling out from the pink beanie on her tiny head.

“Do you want to hold her?” Tatiana asked.

“Can I? I’m scared,” Quintanilla responded.

The soldier picked up his baby girl slowly, careful not to pull the tubes and wires away from the machines and monitors. He kissed her on the forehead and gently laid her down.

Tears ran down his face.

“Wow,” he said, barely able to speak.

In his joy, he found a certain sadness, not because of the machines that tracked her oxygen, temperature and heartbeat, but because of Iraq. The last thing he wanted, he said, was to go back on patrol.

Quintanilla stayed 13 days for rest and relaxation. He and Tatiana spent $5,000 on baby clothes and toys for Leah and eating out. The thought of leaving Leah behind made him think like he never had before.

“I seriously contemplated going AWOL,” he said. With a heavy heart, he boarded a plane and headed back to Iraq. He spent six more months there.

“My time to chill”

Quintanilla played wide receiver, cornerback and quarterback at his high school in Las Vegas. When a football scholarship didn’t come through, he didn’t want to get stuck in a job he didn’t like. He joined the Army just before Sept. 11, 2001.

“I wanted something high- strung,” he said of his decision to enlist.

Back from Iraq for good, he wanted just the opposite.

After a welcome-home ceremony at Fort Carson, Quintanilla wanted only to go home, take a hot shower and have a steak on the grill. He wanted to watch a few lighthearted movies on a television that wasn’t coated with sand. He wanted to fall asleep in a proper bed, not a cot, in an air-conditioned room without sand fleas. The last thing Quintanilla wanted to do was talk about Iraq.

For 30 days, except for a week- long trip to Texas to visit relatives, he hardly left the two-bedroom apartment that he and Tatiana had rented about 8 miles from the post.

Quintanilla sat for whole days, cradling 7-month-old Leah, kissing her neck, tickling her tummy. He fed her bottles, and veged in front of the 27-inch Samsung.

“I don’t want to miss anything, as far as shows coming on,” he said. “I went out every day in Iraq, whether I wanted to or not. This is my time to chill.”

He lay on the dark blue leather couch, pushed Leah in her swing and got up only to go to the bathroom or get a drink.

“I have to beg him to go somewhere,” Tatiana said. “I go out by myself, like I did the whole year.”

On one of the few occasions that he agreed to leave for a trip to the mall, Tatiana gathered up Leah and the diaper bag. Quintanilla reached for his M-16, as he did whenever he left the gate in Iraq, then realized it wasn’t there. He wasn’t in Ramadi anymore.

A worrisome visit

Quintanilla swayed back and forth with Leah while they waited in the pediatric clinic at Evans Army Community Hospital.

Her nine-month checkup was with Dr. Joe Turbyville, an Army major.

Turbyville asked Quintanilla to set Leah on the crinkly white paper that covered the medical table.

Leah weighed 16 pounds, 3 ounces – the same as she did at her six-month checkup.

“Any advice about her weight?” Tatiana asked.

Turbyville assured Tatiana that children level off in their first year.

Quintanilla held Leah while the doctor looked in her ears with an otoscope. He heard her labored breathing.

“Is that normal?” Tatiana asked.

Again, the doctor reassured Tatiana. It’s probably something she’ll grow out of, he said, but he wanted her to see a neurologist.

“We’re going to see her back in the next three months,” Turbyville said.

“Well, we won’t be here,” Tatiana said. “He’s getting out (of the Army) at the end of the next month.”

“Where you going?” the doctor asked.

“Down to Texas, sir.”

“You don’t like the Army anymore?”

“No, sir.”

“When are you getting out?

“Nov. 19, sir.”

Doctors told the Quintanillas that at three or four months, Leah’s brain should have started sending her messages to begin learning how to sit up.

At nine months, Leah hadn’t developed the muscles in her torso and she could not sit. She did not reach out for toys or grab onto them, and could only roll over from her front to her back.

The neurologist was concerned that the soft spots on her skull had grown together too quickly. He scheduled an MRI. If the bones had grown together, Leah would need surgery.

Before Iraq, while the couple were stationed in Korea, Quintanilla and Tatiana were more inclined to go out to dinner, bowling or shopping, but with the baby, they stay home, watch TV or rent movies.

Work, then play

Quintanilla keeps memories of Iraq in a space in his head he wants no one to enter. Even when he flashes photos of Iraq on his computer, he doesn’t say much.

“There’s Jones,” he says, flashing a photo of his friend seriously injured by an IED.

Quintanilla worries about Jones, who suffers from traumatic brain injury, the signature wound of the war on terror.

Quintanilla still has the uniform peppered with specks of Jones’ blood that would not come out in the wash.

“Little mementos,” he said.

Tatiana said she doesn’t worry that her husband has not talked about Iraq.

“Not too much,” she said. “Certain memories that I don’t want him to relive, he tries to push them away. I think it’s a traumatic thing to have to go through, but I don’t think it’s affected him to where he has nightmares or anything like that. He doesn’t wake up.”

Quintanilla sleeps so soundly that he doesn’t budge when the alarm clock rings at 5 a.m. It falls to Tatiana to roust him to get to Fort Carson for physical training by 6 a.m.

When his Army workdays ended in the afternoon, Quintanilla watched television or played a game on PlayStation 2 that he never thought he’d play again since he had done it so often in Iraq.

He bought “SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy SEALs,” in which the bad guys speak Arabic.

Quintanilla parked his car outside the Central Issue Facility, a huge warehouse with windows secured by black iron bars. The digital clock on the dash of the Honda Civic read 5:42 a.m.

“I can’t wait,” Quintanilla said. “Finally.”

The doors won’t open until 7:30 a.m. Quintanilla dropped three duffel bags filled with jackets and clothing on the sidewalk to mark his place in line.

It was the day he planned to “final out” of the Army. Before the sun came up, a dozen soldiers had lined up, as if they were waiting to get concert tickets.

Quintanilla waited in the car, where a picture of Leah rested on the dash. The Army had been good to him. He had no regrets, but said he never wanted to go back to the Middle East.

“Iraq. It wasn’t that great.”

He had applied for the police academy in Austin, Texas, and hoped to get a job there.

“The good thing is we still have our insurance until May, so we’ll be taken care of,” Quintanilla said. “That’s the good thing about the Army that I’m probably going to regret. You know, benefits.”

As he waited to turn in his gear, he fretted about losing the security the Army provides.

“No matter what, your family is going to be taken care of, regardless of the situation that you’re in. The military will do absolutely anything to make sure you’re all right. In the civilian sector, you don’t got that.”

Much of the gear he was supposed to turn in had been lost during the return trip from Iraq. Quintanilla had a memo from a sergeant excusing him from responsibility for the missing items: his Kevlar helmet, winter boots. In all, he was missing $554 worth of gear.

“I wish this place was open 24 hours,” he said.

After 7 a.m., he decided to stand in line, his breath visible in the 12-degree air. When the doors opened, he grabbed a shopping cart, threw his gear inside and headed for a counter to check out.

An hour later, he learned the memo would not suffice.

“I wish they would have told me this earlier. I’d have all this taken care of,” he said.

Quintanilla drove to his unit and found a supply sergeant who could help.

An hour later, the paperwork was in order, but it had to be signed by the captain and the colonel.

It was not a one-day process, though he was trying to cram it into one.

“I need this done today. I can’t wait until tomorrow. My daughter has an appointment.”

Leah actually had two appointments. One for an MRI, the other at Denver International Airport. Her paternal grandmother was flying in from Austin and would fly home with Leah so she didn’t have to make the long drive when the family moved to Texas.

As he waited, the cellphone rang. The doctor’s office said Leah shouldn’t fly after being medicated for the MRI. Tatiana called and canceled the doctor’s appointment.

At 9:30 a.m., Quintanilla set off to get a signature from the battalion commander. On the way, already frustrated by the process, he said, dryly: “I’m contemplating re-enlisting right now. What a joy it would be. I should just go indefinite.”

After an hour inside brigade headquarters, he found out he still hadn’t correctly completed the paperwork.

“I’m not even close, I need more (expletive),” he said. “I’m going to go crazy, absolutely psycho.”

He missed his “final out” appointment, scheduled for 11 a.m.

“These people want to be anal about this friggin’ paperwork,” he said, clearly upset.

Quintanilla drove back to the brigade headquarters, looking for the commander’s signature. The commander was out to lunch.

Quintanilla went back to the Central Issue Facility, thinking he might be able to clear without the commander’s signature. The man he needed to see also was at lunch.

Frustrated, he stood outside his car and smoked a cigarette.

“This is what I (expletive) get for going to Iraq?”

In all, he walked into 19 buildings that day to get required signatures. One of his last stops was the Army recruiter.

A buddy had told him that if he kept his same job and joined the Mississippi National Guard, he’d get an $8,800 signing bonus.

Quintanilla, not sure of how long the drive was from Austin to Mississippi, signed up anyway.

He needed the money to pay off credit-card bills. Besides, the Mississippi National Guard had yet to be deployed, and Quintanilla didn’t think it would be.

For the next three years, he’ll spend a weekend a month and two weeks a year training in Mississippi.

Moving on

The movers came the week of Thanksgiving.

Quintanilla could not wait to get on the road to Texas.

“Man, I can’t wait to leave. I just want to see my girl. I miss her like crazy,” Quintanilla said after four days without his daughter.

Tatiana wiped down the stove as her husband disconnected the computer wires. On the desk, he found the paper that had hung on Leah’s crib in the hospital.

One of the movers found out Quintanilla had served in Iraq.

“Glad you made it back alive,” he said.

“You got your sanity, man?” asked another.

“Yeah,” Quintanilla said.

One of the movers talked about his military service during Operation Desert Storm, but Quintanilla said nothing about Iraq.

He’s out of the Army now.

As the men moved boxes and couches, Quintanilla said some guys he knows liked to tell war stories.

“It’s something to brag about, but the people that aren’t going over there, none of them need to know on a day-to-day basis what’s going on over there, what we went through,” he said.

“It’s better to leave stuff unsaid; that’s the way I look at it,” he said.

Sometime in the future, he said, he’ll jot down a few thoughts in a journal.

“Just to get it off my chest, everything that I buried, all my emotions and everything. Something to share with my grandkids, for my daughter to see later.”

The cellphone rang.

Quintanilla answered. His voice echoed off the empty walls as he talked to his old first sergeant from Korea.

“Today’s the day we make the long drive to Texas,” he said. “I’ve got A-C and radio, and I don’t have to worry about IEDs in the road.”

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